What are you talking about, Karl? None of that is true.
48MP images are captured exactly the same as 12MP (non-HDR) images. Single exposure.
The artifacts occur because the quad bayer sensor results in larger errors when reconstructing the two missing color channels at each photodiode location.
The same errors occur in 12MP mode, they're just not as great in magnitude – usually. An image deliberately selected to amplify these errors will look bad in 12MP too.
Are you familiar with demosaicing algorithms and why artifacts occur? Did you know that the sensor in the Mini3P has demosaicing built-in, it's simple nearest neighbor averaging, and that RGB triples per pixel are read out directly from the sensor then compressed into a jpg, or encoded into a P, B, or I frame for 264 or 265 video output?
This is why there are artifacts in both 12MP and 48MP captures. There's no mechanical offsetting of the sensor with 8 multiple captures. That's crazy.
It's also why you can take the raw output, which contains a specification for the color filter pattern over the raw photodiode values, and put it through a much more sophisticated, compute-intensive demosaicing process, like Adobe's Enhance Details feature in lightroom, and produce a much more accurate, and higher resolution, result. Even with the 12MP output from the
Mini 3.
And that's not even mentioning that to include servos in the gimbal that could accurately position in increments of the photodiode pitch on the sensor would cost like twenty grand